Objects of Police History
Micol Seigel
The local cop on the beat is the predominant image of U.S. police. In popular imagination, civilian officers patrol neighborhoods in their “black and whites” or on foot,
equipped simply with revolvers and radios and outfitted in that pacific but authoritative
shade of blue. Yet the depth and breadth of U.S. police practice far exceed this expression
of limited jurisdiction, civilian status, and public function. U.S. police regularly leap territorial borders, blend civilian and military features, and serve private interests.
To illustrate these counterintuitive but constant crossings, this essay explores the life
and afterlife of one federal agency, the Office of Public Safety (ops), operative from 1962
to 1974. During its dozen active years, amid the Cold War global and domestic uprisings
of the 1960s and 1970s, ops hired hundreds of municipal and state police officers, trained
them in Washington, D.C., and sent them abroad to instruct foreign police in modern, professional methods and develop their counterinsurgency capacities. In the pursuit
of counterinsurgency, ops instructors steered policing across domestic-foreign, civilianmilitary, and private-public divides. Even after their agency closed, former ops employees
continued to blur these distinctions, extending the tactics, technologies, and discourses
of counterinsurgency globally and into the domestic sphere. Within the United States,
ops officers and associates contributed to the intensification of U.S. policing, to corporate
investments in new police technologies, and to the privatization of police employment,
helping frame police practice as counterinsurgency at home.
Into the boom years of the carceral state, ops employees and former employees testified, advised, and labored to furnish U.S. police forces with the capacities of counter­
insurgency. In the opening decades of the twenty-first century, everyday U.S. police practice is, at best, nominally local, civilian, and public. Such conditions are both old and
new. The ostensible borders of policing are fundamentally permeable, crossed constantly
but variably over shifting formations of state power. This essay examines police employed
by one federal office—ops—to follow one era’s instance of such transit: the tilting of U.S.
policing toward counterinsurgency and the consequent militarizing, privatizing, and globalizing of U.S. police practice during the 1970s.
Micol Seigel is an associate professor of American studies and history at Indiana University. She thanks the United
States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, Kelly Lytle Hernández, Khalil Muhammad, Heather Ann Thompson, Stuart Schrader, Thomas J. Adams, Frances Clarke, Sarah Zanti, the anonymous reviewers for the JAH, and to
the men and women of the Office of Public Safety for generously corresponding and discussing their work and for
donating the Public Safety Newsletter for scholarly use by all.
Readers may contact Seigel at [email protected].
doi: 10.1093/jahist/jav280
© The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians.
All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected].
152
The Journal of American History
June 2015
Objects of Police History
153
The Office of Public Safety was established in 1962 by President John F. Kennedy out
of uncoordinated programs in occupied Japan and postwar hot spots including Korea,
Greece, and Iran. Kennedy placed ops under the auspices of his new Agency for International Development (usaid), created in 1961 to oversee foreign aid. Reports that ops tolerated and even taught torture and that its policing was pointedly political began to surface, eventually leading Congress to prohibit foreign police training and terminate ops
in 1974. Before it closed, ops had distributed $200 million in firearms and equipment
to police forces in forty-seven countries, trained over 7,500 senior officers at its academy
and at other U.S. schools, and sent nearly 1,500 advisers overseas to train over 1 million
rank-and-file policemen. Its legacy is ambiguous, with champions touting accomplishments in the professionalization and modernization of corrupt and haphazard police, and
detractors citing enhanced lethality and political partiality among the forces educated.1
Congressional termination was far from the end of the ops story. ops existed on the
supposition that U.S. police were a crucial component of anticommunist foreign policy—a logic that outlasted the organization—so a large number of other programs became
platforms for this work. Such programs included other usaid offices, the U.S. Customs
Service, embassies, myriad narcotics control agencies, the military, private companies
contracted by the State Department or foreign governments, and even national bodies
such as the Saudi Arabian National Guard or the aviation authority of Zaire. A particularly striking example of the continuity of ops under other auspices is the Drug Enforcement Administration, which absorbed whole contingents of demobilized ops personnel,
growing from twenty-four agents stationed abroad in 1969 to over two hundred in 1975
and eventually becoming the vast foreign policing apparatus it represents today. Flaunting
the spirit of the congressional decision to terminate ops, the new positions often entailed
work identical to that performed by the defunct organization. One former ops agent who
became a telecommunications specialist for the Agency for International Development
wrote that his new job entailed “really the same kind of work we were doing for Public
Safety. Only now we are looking after aid employees and contractors’ safety.”2
Overt police assistance returned as well. Less than a decade after terminating ops,
Congress issued waivers to authorize the International Criminal Investigative Training
Assistance Program, then to permit military training in nations without standing armies
1
U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, Hearings before the Committee on Foreign Relations,
United States Senate, Ninety-Third Congress, First Session, on S.1711 and S.2026 to Amend the Foreign Assistance Act
of 1961, and for Other Purposes, and S.2059 to Provide for the Furnishing of the U.S. Government of Foreign Economic
and Humanitarian Assistance, 93 Cong., 1 sess., June 26–27, 1973, pp. 50, 135, 244–53, 361–71. A. J. Langguth,
Hidden Terrors (New York, 1978); Martha K. Huggins, Political Policing: The United States and Latin America (Durham, N.C., 1998), 189–95; Thomas David Lobe, “U.S. Police Assistance for the Third World” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1975); Ernest W. Lefever, U.S. Public Safety Assistance: An Assessment (Washington, 1973); Jan
K. Black, United States Penetration of Brazil (Philadelphia, 1977); Michael T. Klare and Cynthia Arnson, Supplying
Repression: U.S. Support for Authoritarian Regimes Abroad (Washington, 1981); Michael T. Klare, War without End:
American Planning for the Next Vietnams (New York, 1972); J. Patrice McSherry, Predatory States: Operation Condor
and Covert War in Latin America (Lanham, 2005).
2
Public Safety Newsletter (no. 1, May 1974–no. 28, Nov. 1980) (in Micol Seigel’s possession). All issues of the
Public Safety Newsletter in Micol Seigel’s possession will be archived at Herman B. Wells Library at Indiana University, Bloomington, in 2016. On the Saudi Arabian National Guard, see ibid. (no. 11, Oct. 1976), 6 and ibid. (no.
10, July 1976), 2. On the aviation authority of Zaire, see ibid. (no. 4, May 1975), 5; and ibid. (no. 8, Jan. 1976), 6.
Ethan Orram Nadelmann, Cops across Borders: The Internationalization of U.S. Criminal Law Enforcement (University Park, 1993), 119; Klare and Arnson, Supplying Repression, 28–39; Peter Andreas and Richard Price, “From War
Fighting to Crime Fighting: Transforming the American National Security State,” International Studies Review, 3
(Fall 2001), 31–52. For the former Office of Public Safety (ops) agent’s comments, see Public Safety Newsletter (no.
23, Nov. 1979), 5 (in Seigel’s possession).
154
The Journal of American History
June 2015
and emergency police assistance, then, via the 1983 Antiterrorism Assistance Program,
authorizing assistance explicitly to political and military police. Police training programs
are now common and visible across many sites of U.S. engagement such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Haiti, and Sudan.3
The continuity of ops agents’ work abroad after the termination of the office certainly
reveals the scorning of a congressional directive. It also shows the unexceptional regularity of U.S. police labor above the municipal scale and beyond U.S. borders. Federal police
work abroad was quotidian and widespread, extending the long history of such engagements on the part of U.S. police.4
These straightforward observations assume greater importance when placed alongside
the other border crossings that followed the closure of ops. The ongoing foreign police
work performed by ex-ops personnel and the continuity of the kind of labor ops agents
performed and facilitated after their agency’s formal termination—in particular, the multidimensional border crossing of police practice—show this era’s puncturing of the borders
supposed to define policing. Office of Public Safety employees also easily traversed a second
border supposed to contain police work: the line between state and market spheres. They
blurred that line in several ways, from the agency’s fundamental anticommunist mission to
its service to governments most friendly to U.S. “interests.” ops also provided direct service
to private corporations in its work on industrial security—a gray zone of overlapping business and government. The ops Industry and Private Enterprise Office trained personnel at
factories, mines, shipping firms, and energy producers such as Compañia Petrolera California and Empresa Electrica de Guatemala to prevent sabotage, loss, and labor unrest.5
3
Nadelmann, Cops across Borders, 118–20; Huggins, Political Policing; Michael McClintock, Instruments of
Statecraft: U.S. Guerrilla Warfare, Counterinsurgency, and Counter-Terrorism, 1940–1990 (New York, 1992), 389;
Timothy J. Dunn, The Militarization of the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1978–1992: Low-Intensity Conflict Doctrine Comes
Home (Austin, 1996); Jeremy Kuzmarov, Modernizing Repression: Police Training and Nation Building in the American Century (Amherst, Mass., 2012); Stuart Schrader, “American Streets, Foreign Territory: How Counterinsurgent
Knowledge Militarized Policing and Criminalized Color” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, forthcoming); “Office
of Criminal Justice Assistance and Partnership: Civilian Police,” U.S. Department of State, http://www.state.gov/j/
inl/civ/c27153.htm; “About icitap [International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program],” United
States Department of Justice, http://www.justice.gov/criminal/icitap/about.
4
Huggins, Political Policing; Nadelmann, Cops across Borders; Klare and Arnson, Supplying Repression; Andreas
and Price, “From War Fighting to Crime Fighting”; McClintock, Instruments of Statecraft; Dunn, Militarization of
the U.S.-Mexico Border; Kuzmarov, Modernizing Repression; Schrader, “American Streets, Foreign Territory”; Alfred
W. McCoy, Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (Madison, 2009); William O. Walker, Drug Control in the Americas (Albuquerque, 1981); James R. Holmes, Theodore Roosevelt and World Order: Police Power in International Relations (Washington, 2006); Ron Levi and John Hagan, “International Police,” in The New Police Science: The Police Power in Domestic and International Governance, ed. Markus
D. Dubber and Mariana Valverde (Stanford, 2006), 207–47; John Dinges, The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His
Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents (New York, 2004); Douglas Valentine, The Phoenix Program: America’s
Use of Terror in Vietnam (New York, 1990); Gary T. Marx, Undercover: Police Surveillance in America (Berkeley,
1988); National Action Research on the Military-Industrial Complex, comp., They’re Bringing It All Back: Police on
the Homefront (Philadelphia, 1971); Kelly Lytle Hernández, Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (Berkeley,
2010); Elana Zilberg, Space of Detention: The Making of a Transnational Gang Crisis between Los Angeles and San Salvador (Durham, N.C., 2011); Katherine Ruth Unterman, Nowhere to Hide: International Fugitives and American
Power, 1880–1930 (unpublished manuscript in Katherine R. Unterman’s possession).
5
“Protection of Vital Governmental Installations and Private-owned Industrial Facilities,” Frank A. Jessup to
Mr. Kent Lutey (Chief, Industry and Private Enterprise Office), Sept. 13, 1965, Physical Security—Correspondence—Rio de Janeiro folder, file 286-75-162, box 1, “USAid/Brasilia, fiscal year 1963/1965, Official Project
Files,” hms entry UD-WW-400: Brazil Subj/Proj 56-73, Communications and Records Management Division,
Agency for International Development Records, rg 286 (National Archives, Washington, D.C.). “Completion
of T[emporary] D[ut]Y Assignment—Guatemala,” George E. Miller (P[ublic]S[afety] Advisor, Physical Security,
P[ublic] S[afety] D[ivision]/Brazil) through Jessup (Chief, psd/Brazil) to Bryon Engle (Dir, ops/W[ashington]),
June 15, 1965, ibid.; “Field Visit, São Paulo—March 23, 1965, to March 31, 1965,” Miller to Jessup, April 1, 1965,
Physical Security—Monthly and Trip/Rio de Janeiro folder, ibid.
Objects of Police History
155
When ops ended, its former employees stepped easily over the state-market divide to
work for private entities such as the Brazilian engineering firm Promon Engenharia; TAI,
Inc., a United States–based engineering firm operating in Tehran; E & J Gallo Winery; the
shipping giant PacEx in Hawaii; and proprietary firms such as Public Safety Services, Inc.6
Police breaching of the public-private divide is as old as police exceeding municipal
jurisdiction. Historians have detailed how police blur the lines between state and market
by laboring in the service of capital. This oft-made point has a less noticed counterpart:
private police do the work of the state. The for-profit William J. Burns International Detective Agency and the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, for example, composed the
only national police force (prior to the creation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation
[fbi] in 1909) paid by the state indirectly via federal government contracts. Those agencies were less displaced by than absorbed into the fbi, which built on their records systems
and drew personnel from their ranks.7
The growth of private policing during the Cold War was as dependent on public support as it had been during the era of the Burns and Pinkerton agencies. The familiar
contract form was supplemented by innovative ways to direct resources to private police,
such as mandating security for federally funded research and development. Government
forces also created a broad climate of support. The fbi, the National Association of Manufacturers, the U.S. Army Office of the Provost Marshal General, and the Chamber of
Commerce, for example, collaborated in various combinations to produce seminars and
pamphlets recommending that industry purchase security measures. They succeeded explosively. Finally, as we have seen, via ops the federal government made this recommendation directly to foreign nations. ops became one part of the Cold War iteration of hybrid
public-private policing, contributing its small share to the ongoing entanglement of these
ostensibly autonomous domains.8
6
Public Safety Newsletter (no. 3, Feb. 1975), 2, 4; ibid. (no. 4, May 1975), 7; ibid. (no. 5, July 1975), 2; ibid.
(no. 7, Nov. 1975), 3; ibid. (no. 8, Jan. 1976), 6, 8; ibid. (no. 11, Oct. 1976), 3; ibid. (no. 17, July 1978), 2; ibid.
(no. 25, April 1980), 5. On Promon Engenharia, see ibid. (no. 16, March 1978), 2. On TAI, Inc., see ibid. (no. 8,
Jan. 1976), 6. On Public Safety Services, Inc., see ibid. (no. 7, Nov. 1975), 3; ibid. (no. 8, Jan. 1976), 4; ibid. (no.
10, July 1976), 2; ibid. (no. 14, July 1977), 1; and ibid. (no. 24, Jan. 1980), 1.
7
On public police serving the interests of capital, see Richard Quinney, Critique of Legal Order: Crime Control
in Capitalist Society (Boston, 1974); Center for Research on Criminal Justice, The Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove: An
Analysis of the U.S. Police (San Francisco, 1975); Robert M. Fogelson, Big-City Police (Cambridge, Mass., 1977); Stuart
Hall et al., Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (New York, 1978); Sidney L. Harring, Policing a
Class Society: The Experience of American Cities, 1865–1915 (New Brunswick, 1983); Robert Reiner, The Politics of the
Police (Oxford, 1984); Tony Jefferson, The Case against Paramilitary Policing (Buckingham, 1990); Thomas H. Holloway, Policing Rio de Janeiro: Repression and Resistance in a Nineteenth-Century City (Stanford, 1993); Clyde Woods,
Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta (New York, 1998); Mark Neocleous, The
Fabrication of Social Order: A Critical Theory of Police Power (London, 2000); David Garland, The Culture of Control:
Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society (Chicago, 2001); Neil Websdale, Policing the Poor: From Slave Plantation to Public Housing (Boston, 2001); and Hernández, Migra!. On private police, see Steven Spitzer and Andrew Scull,
“Privatization and Capitalist Development: The Case of the Private Police,” Social Problems, 25 (Oct. 1977), 18–29;
George O’Toole, The Private Sector: Private Spies, Rent-a-Cops, and the Police-Industrial Complex (New York, 1978);
Phillip C. Stenning and Clifford D. Shearing, “The Quiet Revolution: The Nature, Development, and General Legal
Implications of Private Policing in Canada,” Criminal Law Quarterly, 22 (March 1980), 220–48; Clifford D. Shearing
and Phillip C. Stenning, “Modern Private Security: Its Growth and Implications,” in Crime and Justice, vol. III: An Annual Review of Research, ed. Michael Tonry and Norval Morris (Chicago, 1981), 193–245; Clifford D. Shearing, “The
Relation between Public and Private Policing,” Crime and Justice, vol. XV: Modern Policing (Chicago, 1992), 399–434;
Nadelmann, Cops across Borders; Beverley A. Smith and Frank T. Morn, “The History of Privatization in Criminal Justice,” in Privatization in Criminal Justice: Past, Present, and Future, ed. David Shichor and Michael J. Gilbert (Cincinnati, 2001), 3–22; and Robert P. Weiss, “From Cowboy Detectives to Soldiers of Fortune: Private Security Contracting and Its Contradictions on the New Frontiers of Capitalist Expansion,” Social Justice, 34 (Fall–Winter 2007), 1–19.
8
Robert D. McCrie, “A Brief History of the Security Industry in the United States,” in Business and Crime Prevention, ed. Mark Felson and Ronald V. Clarke (Monsey, 1997), 197–218; U.S. Federal Civil Defense Administration,
156
The Journal of American History
June 2015
The Office of Public Safety can also help us revisit a third border observed in police
work: the fraught line between military and civilian spheres. ops agents found themselves
spanning this line from the earliest moment of their organization’s creation, when global
politics demanded that the United States exert influence via civilian rather than military
channels. Officials designing ops well understood that their mandate was to wrap foreign
aid in the sheep’s clothing of humanitarian assistance. “All Military Assistance Programs
throughout Latin America either have been or are in the process of being redirected to
the problem of Internal Security throughout the Western Hemisphere,” they agreed privately. Since “the Department of Defense does not support ‘police’ forces in the common
definition of the term,” they placed ops in the Department of State. In another move
to claim civilian status, ops administrators made a pointed attempt to recruit domestic
police.9
Yet the bases on which ops was founded were, quite literally, military bases, such as
Fort Davis in the Panama Canal Zone, where the Inter-American Police Academy was
initially sited. ops officers became intimate with foreign police forces organized under
military command in the field, and in their classrooms, which mixed “military and police
officers with ranks that ranged from sergeant to colonel.”10 Most important, the organization set as its principal task the fundamentally hybrid practice of counterinsurgency.
Counterinsurgency was the premier U.S. military priority globally by the early 1960s.
In contrast to military strategy focused on troop maneuvers and large-scale engagements
of armies, counterinsurgency responded to guerrilla resistance and other smaller currents
of dissent. It emphasized proximity to populations that might support the opposition so
as to demonstrate governmental benevolence, enable economic growth, and gather intelligence. Police officers’ quotidian, proximate relation to their constituents suggested
them as ideal counterinsurgents, but the military context drew them into theaters of war,
casting military forces into corollary “police-like” roles. Counterinsurgency confuses the
civilian-military distinction in which police protect citizens at home and soldiers attack
enemies abroad by teaching security forces of both kinds to target the “enemy within,”
10 Steps to Industrial Survival (Washington, 1956); U.S. Business and Defense Services Administration, Civil Defense Training for Business and Industry (Washington, 1968); Thomas Ennis, “Fear of Sabotage Spurs Industrial Security Drive,” New York Times, Oct. 2, 1970, p. 20; U.S. Office of the Provost Marshal General, Industrial Defense
against Civil Disturbances, Bombings, Sabotage (Washington, 1970); National Association of Manufacturers, Bomb
Threats to Industry: Suggested Action to Protect Employees and Property (Washington, 1971). William C. Cunningham,
John J. Strauchs, and Clifford W. Van Meter, “Private Security: Patterns and Trends,” National Institute of Justice
Research in Brief (Aug. 1991), 1–2; Michael Kempa, “Public Policing, Private Security, Pacifying Populations,” in
Anti-Security, ed. Mark Neocleous and George S. Rigakos (Ottawa, 2001), 85–105; McCrie, “A Brief History of
the Security Industry in the United States”; O’Toole, Private Sector; Shearing, “Relation between Public and Private Policing”; Spitzer and Scull, “Privatization and Capitalist Development”; Weiss, “From Cowboy Detectives to
Soldiers of Fortune.”
9
On U.S. circumvention of laws prohibiting military intervention by reframing it as humanitarian aid, see the
discussion of the Geneva Accords and the Morse Amendment to the Mutual Securities Act in McClintock, Instruments of Statecraft, 132; Marilyn B. Young, The Vietnam Wars: 1945–1990 (New York, 1991), 41–42; and Michael
J. Francis, “Military Aid to Latin America in the U.S. Congress,” Journal of Inter-American Studies, 6 (July 1964),
389–404. “Department of Defense Participation in Support of Foreign ‘Police’ Forces,” n.d., p. 2, ips History References folder, box 3: 8 Pakistan–8F Venezuela, hms entry 21, Office of Public Safety, Office of the Director, General
Records 1959–1974, Agency for International Development Records; David B. Bell, “Memorandum for the Special Group (ci),” April 5, 1965, p. 5, ibid.; ops Personnel Data, n.d., ips 21-6 Personnel and Staffing folder, box 11,
hms entry 21, Office of the Director, numerical file 1956–1974, ibid. Lobe, “U.S. Police Assistance for the Third
World,” 56–61. For the state-level or municipal-level police experience of ops employees, see the U.S. Department
of State’s quarterly Foreign Service List and annual Biographic Register, and the Public Service Newsletter. Micol Seigel,
“Beyond the Beat: Cold War Cops and the Nature of State Power” (unpublished manuscript in Seigel’s possession).
10
Adolph Saenz, The ops Story (San Francisco, 2002), 33.
Objects of Police History
157
producing a field of coinciding military and civilian spheres. ops was created in this fused
field and, as one of the sites for the development of counterinsurgency in practice, contributed to its elaboration.11
In blurring the military-civilian line, just as in its travels between state and market
and across scale, ops was hardly unique. Many scholars have observed “overlapping police and military tasks” in U.S. history, from the constabulary forces of the early republican navy and marines to the military organization of the mid-nineteenth century “new
police” to mixed-format agencies such as the Texas Rangers or U.S. Border Patrol. Today, military bases offer regular police training in shared skills such as firearms use, and
paramilitary units are a part of nearly every major urban police force. Political theorists
explain that police and military occupy points along the continuum of state violence,
separated sometimes spatially and at other moments by philosophy—the fluid line between them now and again dissolved. As Anthony Giddens explains, the military-civilian
boundary is vague, “flimsy,” “rarely clear-cut” and “usually full of tension.” Yet the police
scholar Peter Kraska observes that most “police academics . . . assume that studying the
police and military is a mutually exclusive undertaking.”12
ops’s variation from the prototypical model of the municipal, civilian, public police
force began to matter in the United States more directly when unrest erupted across urban areas during the mid-1960s. Amid those disturbances, Americans began to think
that counterinsurgency belonged at home. The lessons of ops began to ramify across U.S.
soil.13
Even before the dramatic 1960s protests, city officials across the nation had begun to
look to “defense intellectuals” for advice on urban planning. The riots invited authorities
already thinking along these lines to posit that U.S. cities were comparable to war-torn
Third World locations. During the 1965 rebellions in Watts, Los Angeles, police chief
William H. Parker compared his situation to “fighting the Viet Cong”; Daryl F. Gates,
then serving as a field commander for Parker, agreed that “the streets of America had
become a foreign territory.” Gates and fellow officers began reading up on the Vietnam
conflict, consulting with U.S. Marines at the nearby Chavez Ravine Training Center to
prep themselves on counterinsurgency and guerrilla warfare. At the 1966 meeting of
11
Stathis Kalyvas, “The Paradox of Terrorism in Civil War,” Journal of Ethics, 8 (March 2004), 129; McClintock,
Instruments of Statecraft; Thomas L. Ahern Jr., Vietnam Declassified: The cia and Counterinsurgency (Lexington, Ky.
2010); David H. Ucko, The New Counterinsurgency Era: Transforming the U.S. Military for Modern Wars (Washington, 2009); McCoy, Policing America’s Empire, 17; Larry E. Cable, Conflict of Myths: The Development of American
Counter-Insurgency Doctrine and the Vietnam War (New York, 1986); Dunn, Militarization of the U.S.-Mexico Border, 4, 21–24; Michael T. Klare, “The Interventionist Impulse: U.S. Military Doctrine for Low-Intensity Warfare,”
in Low-Intensity Warfare: Counterinsurgency, Proinsurgency, and Antiterrorism in the Eighties, ed. Michael T. Klare
and Peter Kornbluh (New York, 1988), 57–58.
12
Peter Andreas and Richard Price, “From War Fighting to Crime Fighting: Transforming the American National Security State,” International Studies Review, 3 (Fall 2001), 35; Jerome H. Skolnick and James J. Fyfe, Above
the Law: Police and the Excessive Use of Force (New York, 1993), 116–17; Dunn, Militarization of the U.S.-Mexico
Border, 12–13; Hernández, Migra!; Catherine Lutz, “Making War at Home in the United States: Militarization
and the Current Crisis,” American Anthropologist, 104 (Sept. 2002), 723–35; Egon Bittner, “The Quasi-military
Organization of the Police,” in The Functions of the Police in Modern Society, by Egon Bittner (Chevy Chase, 1970),
52–62; Anthony Giddens, A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, vol. II: The Nation-State and Violence
(Berkeley, 1981), 192, 327; Charles Maechling Jr., “Counterinsurgency: The First Ordeal by Fire,” in Low-Intensity
Warfare, ed. Klare and Kornbluh, 31; Peter B. Kraska, “Militarization and Policing—Its Relevance to 21st Century
Police,” Policing, 1 (no. 4, 2007), 503; Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Globalisation and U.S. Prison Growth: From Military Keynesianism to Post-Keynesian Militarism,” Race and Class, 40 (March 1999), 171–88; Kraska, “Militarization and Policing,” 501.
13
Schrader, “American Streets, Foreign Territory.”
158
The Journal of American History
June 2015
the National League of Cities, Detroit mayor Jerome Cavanagh compared the guerilla
warfare on U.S. city streets to the fighting in the Mekong Delta. After the 1967 Detroit
uprisings, Lyndon B. Johnson shaped his administration’s response in ways that echoed
the U.S. stance in the Vietnam War—a framing that by then resonated deeply with the
American public. Ever more often sounded, the comparison was becoming bedrock
common sense. Targets of this policing used it themselves, accusing the United States
of levying Cold War fighting power against its own citizens: the Chicano Los Angeles
newspaper Inside Eastside denounced police for “waging a ‘cold war in East L.A.,’” and
activists saw echoes of themselves in anti-imperialist resistance fighters such as the Viet
Cong.14
Cold War metaphors for urban unrest extended easily to political dissent and eventually to the racialized fear of crime. Many city officials saw the logic in Los Angeles police chief Thomas Reddin’s multiple conflations: “The present Negro movement is just as
subversive as the past Communist movement or just as dangerous as the organized crime
movement.” Such a confusion of demands for racial justice with illegal activity seeded the
arena in which laws would be written to contain and respond to both.15
The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders was charged with understanding the causes of the 1960s violence and preventing its recurrence. The commission reflected the prevailing wisdom about the relevance of military expertise for domestic purposes, soliciting testimony from authorities with overseas experience. Commission chair
Otto Kerner and his colleagues heard from ops specifically, hiring two former Office of
Public Safety agents as consultants and featuring a presentation by ops director Byron
Engle. Engle explained that ops’s important “investigative capability” and its violence
control required “a carefully integrated effort between the regular police including their
paramilitary elements and military forces operating separately or in conjunction with
each other. Obviously, anything we do in the organization field must be related to the prevailing political, social, economic, cultural, legal and other factors.” This sense of the integrated nature of security work suffused the commission’s widely read final report, which
incorporated all of Engle’s proposals for intelligence, community relations, emergency
units, and communications. More importantly, the commission’s deliberations revealed a
consensus about the convergence of foreign and domestic spheres. “Mr. Engle,” commission chair Kerner explained before Engle said a word, “will talk about the lessons learned
from civil disorders in both this country and abroad, and the fundamental basic principles which apply internationally.” The point is not only causation—ops did not shape
the commission’s findings more than any other stream of influence—but wide intellectual
14
Jennifer S. Light, From Warfare to Welfare: Defense Intellectuals and Urban Problems in Cold War America (Baltimore, 2003), 1; Julilly Kohler-Hausmann, “Militarizing the Police: Officer Jon Burge, Torture, and War in the ‘Urban Jungle,’” in Challenging the Prison-Industrial Complex: Activism, Arts, and Educational Alternatives, ed. Stephen
John Hartnett (Urbana, 2011), 48; Tracy Tullis, “A Vietnam at Home: Policing the Ghettos in the Counterinsurgency Era” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1999), 102, 105, 110; Edward Escobar, “The Dialectics of Repression: The Los Angeles Police Department and the Chicano Movement, 1968–1971,” Journal of American History, 79
(March 1993), 1496; Alyosha Goldstein, Poverty in Common: The Politics of Community Action during the American
Century (Durham, N.C., 2012); Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy
(Princeton, 2000); Schrader, “American Streets, Foreign Territory.”
15
Escobar, “Dialectics of Repression,” 1494; Vesla Mae Weaver, “Frontlash: Race and the Development of Punitive Crime Policy,” Studies in American Political Development, 21 (Fall 2007), 230–65; Michael W. Flamm, Law
and Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York, 2005); Naomi Murakawa,
“The Origins of the Carceral Crisis: Racial Order as ‘Law and Order’ in Postwar American Politics,” in Race and
American Political Development, ed. Joseph Lowndes, Julie Novkov, and Dorian T. Warren (New York, 2008), 388–
423; Naomi Murakawa, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America (Oxford, 2014).
Objects of Police History
159
accord. Engle’s testimony was received by listeners who already possessed a robust faith in
the applicability of counterinsurgency theory to U.S. conditions.16
This consensus was translated into law as the 1968 Omnibus Crime Control and
Safe Streets Act, the source of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (leaa),
a twelve-year, 8-billion-dollar program that used block grants to the fifty states and private entities to develop public safety–related programs, with police departments receiving the lion’s share of the funding. The leaa guided U.S. police over the borders that ops
had crossed abroad—those of scale and territory as well as military-civilian and publicprivate.17
Through the leaa, U.S. police entered an era of federal management, spurning the
distinctions of scale that U.S. police supposedly respect via local corps and state jurisdiction over police power. The leaa also funded crossings of territorial boundaries, such as
the technical assistance they offered to foreign governments in the arenas of drugs, skyjacking, and terrorism. Many of the people who ended up implementing these programs
were former ops employees, such as the director of criminal justice assistance for the New
England area, a technical advisor in the Washington, D.C.–based training division, and
the Denver regional administrator; many worked in leaa-funded programs, such as a National Sheriff’s Association project on courtroom security or a training film on California’s
Law Enforcement Mutual Aid System.18
The leaa’s most noticeable effect involved hardware, consequential for police forces
that had worked primarily via pistols and patrol cars for decades. The agency facilitated
transfers of technologies used by ops or the military abroad, encouraging aerospace and
electronics industries then energetically developing weapons for war to sell at home. New
and experimental technologies funded by the leaa flooded U.S. police departments in
the late 1960s and 1970s: aircraft, complex communications systems, computer-assisted
mapping and planning tools, sniper talent, and special forces such as swat (Special Weap16
“Statement of Byron Engle, Director, Office of Public Safety, A.I.D., to the National Advisory Commission
on Civil Disorders,” Sept. 20, 1967, in Civil Rights during the Johnson Administration, 1963–1969, ed. Steven F.
Lawson, part 5 (Bethesda, 1984) (microfilm: frame 310, reel 3), box 3, series 1: Transcripts and Agenda of Hearings,
July 29–Nov. 9, 1967, National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders Records, rg 282 (National Archives and
Records Administration). On Byron Engle’s proposals, see Schrader, “American Streets, Foreign Territory”; Tullis,
“A Vietnam at Home,” 25–28, 107–8; Lee Webb, “Back Home: The Campus Beat,” in They’re Bringing It All Back,
comp. National Action Research on the Military-Industrial Complex, 1–20; and Michael T. Klare, “Bringing It
Back: Planning for the City,” ibid., 66–73.
17
Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, 82 Stat. 197 (1968). Malcolm M. Feeley and Austin
D. Sarat, The Policy Dilemma: Federal Crime Policy and the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, 1968–1978
(Minneapolis, 1980); Jay N. Varon, “A Reexamination of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration,” Stanford Law Review, 27 (May 1975), 1303–24; Daniel Richman, “The Past, Present, and Future of Violent Crime
Federalism,” in Crime and Justice, vol. XXXIV: A Review of Research, ed. Michael Tonry (Chicago, 2006), 377–439;
Edward J. Clynch, “The Spending of Law Enforcement Assistance Administration Block Grants by the States: A Report,” Justice System Journal, 2 (Winter 1976), 157–168; C. Holden, “Law Enforcement Assistance Administration:
Anticrime Agency Faces Criticism, Lowered Budget,” Science, July 2, 1976, pp. 36–37; Samuel Walker, “Between
Two Worlds: The President’s Crime Commission and the Police, 1967–1992,” in The 1967 President’s Crime Commission Report: Its Impact 25 Years Later, ed. John A. Conley (Cincinnati, 1994), 21–35. For specific budget amounts
and allocations see Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, Annual Reports.
18
Walker, “Between Two Worlds,” 26; Robert F. Diegelman, “Federal Financial Assistance for Crime Control:
Lessons of the leaa Experience,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 73 (Fall 1982), 994–1011; Task Force
on the Federalization of Criminal Law, the American Bar Association, and the Criminal Justice Section, The Federalization of Criminal Law (Washington, 1998); Nancy F. Marion, Federal Government and Criminal Justice (New
York, 2011); Wilbur R. Miller, Revenuers and Moonshiners: Enforcing Federal Liquor Law in the Mountain South,
1865–1900 (Chapel Hill, 1991); Nadelmann, Cops across Borders, 118–19; Public Safety Newsletter (no. 20, May
1979), 4; ibid. (no. 25, April 1980), 1; ibid. (no. 12, Dec. 1976), 1; ibid. (no. 8, Jan. 1976), 8; ibid. (no. 14, July
1977), 1; ibid. (no. 15, Dec. 1977), 1.
160
The Journal of American History
June 2015
ons and Tactics) teams. Technology transfers were relatively easy to do, and the leaa
leaned into them so abundantly that critics complained of an overemphasis. More recent
observers such as Radley Balko lament that these military tools, in particular swat teams,
have made U.S. police vastly more lethal.19
In addition to providing materiel, the leaa funded the U.S. police to intensify their
activities in one of the central aspects of counterinsurgency strategy: intelligence gathering. Through a special statutory mandate to privilege detection and prevention of civil
disorder, the leaa “quickened” a police intelligence surge, Frank Donner details, producing a “movement for intelligence solutions to unrest” which rendered “an extraordinary
proliferation of new police [intelligence] units and an equally extraordinary expansion of
established ones.” No wonder the historian of militarization M. S. Sherry calls the period
between 1966 and 1974—the last eight years of ops operations and the first six years of
the leaa—the “War Mentality in Triumph.”20
The leaa also fed private policing and hybrid public-private ventures. Its grants buoyed
all parts of the industry, including private and semiprivate think tanks, for-profit researchand-development and tech firms, and private universities. leaa bequests funded a series
of hortatory reports by the RAND Corporation exalting private policing, and follow-up
studies by Hallcrest Systems “to advance the reform agenda RAND had initiated.” The
leaa developed regulatory statutes for private policing, acknowledging its nested location
within circles of state authority. In the early 1980s the leaa National Institute of Justice
(nij) helped set up a Joint Council of Law Enforcement and Private Security Associations, an umbrella organization uniting the International Association of Chiefs of Police,
the National Sheriffs Association, and the American Society for Industrial Security, which
had begun meeting jointly to facilitate their collaboration.21
In a 1991 follow-up to the Hallcrest Report, the nij addressed this paradoxical situation. It acknowledged the sheer size of private security, “now clearly the Nation’s primary
protective resource, outspending public law enforcement by 73 percent and employing
2½ times the workforce.” It also admitted what it called “the growing interdependence of
the public and private sectors” given that state, local, and federal government spending
on private security had grown to over $297 billion by 1988. Wrestling with the separation necessary to preserve the legitimacy of government in the public eye, the nij un19
Kathleen Battles, Calling All Cars: Radio Dragnets and the Technology of Policing (Minneapolis, 2010); O’Toole,
Private Sector, 169–70; Peter B. Kraska and Victor E. Kappeler, “Militarizing American Police: The Rise and Normalization of Paramilitary Units,” Social Problems, 44 (Feb. 1997), 1–18; Feeley and Sarat, Policy Dilemma; Holden,
“Law Enforcement Assistance Administration”; Walker, “Between Two Worlds”; Les Gapay, “Beyond Dick Tracy:
Police Go Space-Age in Big Cities and Small, to Dismay of Critics,” Wall Street Journal, Aug. 9, 1971, pp. 1, 21;
John Herbers, “Conflicts Beset U.S. Anticrime Agency,” New York Times, Dec. 28, 1970, pp. 1, 36. Radley Balko,
Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America (Washington, 2006); Diane Cecilia Weber, “Warrior Cops:
The Ominous Growth of Paramilitarism in American Police Departments,” Aug. 26, 1999, briefing paper no.
50, Cato Institute, http://www.cato.org/publications/briefing-paper/warrior-cops-ominous-growth-paramilitarismamerican-police-departments; Skolnick and Fyfe, Above the Law.
20
Frank J. Donner, Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America (Berkeley, 1990),
77; Task Force Report—Science and Technology: A Report to the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice (Washington, 1967). M. S. Sherry, In the Shadow of War: The United States since the 1930s
(New Haven, 1995), 283–336, esp. 283.
21
James Kakalik and Sorrel Wildhorn, Private Security in the United States: Findings and Recommendations (5
vols., Washington, 1972); William C. Cunningham and Todd H. Taylor, Private Security and Police in America: The
Hallcrest Report (Portland, 1985); William C. Cunningham, John J. Strauchs, and Clifford W. Van Meter, Private
Security Trends (1970 to 2000): The Hallcrest Report II (Stoneham, 1990); Shearing, “Relation between Public and
Private Policing,” 410–15; McCrie, “Brief History of the Security Industry in the United States,” 203; Reginald
Stuart, “Billions for Protection: Jittery Americans Rent or Buy Security Plans,” New York Times, March 30, 1975, p.
119; Cunningham, Strauchs, and Van Meter, “Private Security,” 1–2.
Objects of Police History
161
derstood that it had to toe a certain line. Straining grammar in the throes of policing’s
public-private contradiction, it insisted that “Crime-related services provided by public
law enforcement are rooted in constitutional responsibilities and perhaps should never be
contracted away.”22
A similar strain vexes those who would defend the military-civilian divide. An ops officer assured Congress that U.S. assistance had improved the Brazilian police’s “image as
a civil, as opposed to military, organization.” Anxious to dismiss any substantive mixings,
he tripped over the contradiction: “The fact that military officers are assigned to head
the various organizations is really aside from that.” The former ops director Lauren Goin
wrote a paean to the office’s memory for a 2002 retrospective about the agency, placing
“civil” before “police” eight times in seven paragraphs. Such excess reveals the tension in
insisting on the sanctity of distinctions that are habitually collapsed in practice.23
During recent public controversy over a white police officer’s fatal shooting of Michael
Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, transfers of military technology to U.S. police have again
risen to public view. President Barack Obama staved off criticism with a promise of review, agreeing with critics that “there is a big difference between our military and our local law enforcement and we don’t want those lines blurred. That would be contrary to our
traditions.” Militarized police may be contrary to the benevolent ideal of the devoted cop
on the beat, but U.S. police practice has regularly blurred military-civilian lines just as it
has crossed territorial borders, levels of scale, and public-private distinctions.24
This essay has followed policing across the borders assumed to confine it in the hopes
of producing a fine-grained picture of the workings of state power.25 Police associated
with the Office of Public Safety, it has argued, crossed military-civilian, public-private,
scalar and territorial borders, building upon much older scaffolding to produce the vast,
variegated policing apparatus of the carceral state.
Cunningham, Strauchs, and Van Meter, “Private Security,” 1–2.
Black, United States Penetration of Brazil, 152; Lauren Goin, “Preface,” in ops Story, by Saenz, xxiv.
24
Martin Kaste, “Police Militarization Becomes a Hot Topic,” Aug. 19, 2014, npr, http://www.npr
.org/2014/08/19/341542537/police-militarization-becomes-a-hot-topic.
25
Timothy Mitchell, “Society, Economy, and the State Effect,” in State/Culture: State-Formation after the Cultural Turn, ed. George Steinmetz (Ithaca, 1999), 76–97; Philip Abrams, “Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the
State,” Journal of Historical Sociology, 1 (1977; March 1988), 58–89.
22
23